Would you be able to survive one full day without using the X server? Linux offers us a wide assortment of CLI based tools which use curses and/or framebuffer for functional user interfaces. There is no reason why you shouldn't be able look up stuff online, read your email, look at pictures, watch movies and listen to music as you are trying to configure X.

I could live without X on *nix as I've deal with it regularly but if faced with it permanently, my system would quickly become far less interesting.

As we say, use the right tool for the job. GUI applications are the best tools for a lot of tasks. Personally, I use mostly GUI apps at home, but I reach for the terminal for almost all system administration and some file management tasks simply because it's easier--for me. At work, I spend most of my time in about a dozen terminals ssh'ed into a remote box. I have a script that checks my open terminals and starts a new one with a unique foreground color in order of my personal color preferences. This way I can quickly find the orange terminal I was using for cscope, for example. It's all about what works for me, which might seem weird or even frightening to other people.

Looking at a black screen with white text 24/7 only generates so much excitement. Your also guaranteed a migraine headache to top it off.

In my experience, looking at predominantly white screens common in GUI environments by default is more likely to cause headaches and eye strain than looking at mostly black screens. I always use black backgrounds wherever practical, because shining all that unnecessary light at my eyes all day is sure the accelerate the deterioration of my vision as I get older.

For others, one has to imagine how much power a blinking white cursor draws from their $2000+ gaming system and how great of an investment that might have been for the owner.

Actually, that blinking cursor sucks more power than you might think, particularly due to the way that modern CPUs manage their power states. A completely idle machine with a blinking cursor has to wake up every half second or so to make the cursor blink, which can even prevent the machine from ever entering the deeper sleep states. This is usually irrelevant on full-blown desktop, since there are all sorts of applications and daemons waking up left and right to poll stuff and pat themselves on the back. When the blinking cursor in the terminal becomes the limiting factor on idle power consumption, we know the PowerTOP project has been successful.